Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Free World Vignettes
enormous—and generally ignored by the press, which is not interested
in US atrocities. Reviewing the press record, Alexander Cockburn aptly
comments: “All you need is a complicit or cowed press and a
mendacious State Department and the American people need scarcely
know that repeats of My Lai and Operation Speedy Express are taking
place not far south of Miami and are sponsored by their government.” 52
As in Argentina under the generals, a Committee of Mothers of
Disappeared Prisoners, formed at the initiative of assassinated
Archbishop Romero, keeps a weekly vigil outside the Cathedral in San
Salvador, carrying pictures of missing relatives. Two of the mothers were
given the annual human rights awards of the Robert Kennedy
Foundation, but were denied visas on grounds that they had taken part
in unspecified acts of violence. Roberto d’Aubuisson, one of the worst
killers, was granted a visa a month later; the distinction reflects
accurately the moral climate in Washington. A delegation of US labor
leaders reports that the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US Embassy in
San Salvador told them that one of the women “deserves” to be killed by
security forces because her sons are fighting with the guerrillas. 53
The two award recipients were, however, admitted to England, where
the population apparently does not require protection from unpleasant
truths. There, they described how their family members were murdered,
tortured or “disappeared.” One of the women had been raped, tortured
and sprayed with bullets when she inquired about the whereabouts of
her brothers and daughter; her right breast was cut off and she has
artificial tubes for internal organs. These, apparently, were the acts of
violence in which the mothers took part, making them ineligible for entry
to the Land of the Free.
The Kennedy award was accepted in their name by a Salvadoran
woman who came here from her exile in Mexico. She had witnessed the
beating of her husband and rape of her two youngest children and “is
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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